I've been looking forward to this powerful work for a while, and I'm so glad I finally got to it. It's a read that will stay with me for many years, already ranked up there with Erdrich, Momaday, and others for the impact it has made.

Equally, I wanted to like it enough for a full five stars, and there is plenty of reason to praise it. Orange offers us about a dozen different characters across a few generations, their stories original in their tangled interweaving, their pasts various chapters of social, domestic, and political shredding, and the language which presents each of their points of view nearly unique. Everything about these people is real, genuine, painful and resigned, loving or jaded. Their reasons for converging on a powwow in Oakland are equally varied, and one wonder how they will ultimately meet, what fruits will come of the gathering, if any.

But this is where Orange, I think, sold his own story a bit short. All plot directions point to the powwow at the end of the book, the place where they will gather. Orange even offers an interlude to the narrative to discuss the nature of powwow. The set-ups are all there.

But I think Orange didn't trust his own narration, his own characters, to do their work at the end. Resolution to a story anymore doesn't mean a fairy tale closure of character arcs, nor does it mean that everyone finds what they need; just as often, stories find their way to unexpected spaces, to questions, or the absence of resolutions at all. But Orange--a younger writer still, thankfully, who has many more novels left in him, we hope--chose to resolve his story through an action sequence which spoke to none of what he set up in the first two-thirds of the book.

True, this was the goal of some of the characters attending, but one of his characters actually thinks this, and not much of a spoiler since it is revealed in the first dozen pages: "Who steals from a powwow?"  The heist idea is the least important motivation from the entire novel, especially as its potential significance culturally is never explored.

   As it happens, the only unresolved question readers are left with is one about a plotting element: What happened to x? instead of anything which was meaningful to the beautiful interior conflicts he had created. One may argue that the resolution was "realistic" and "taught a lesson," but such trite arguments are matched by the overdone television plots which offer exactly the same levels of insight.

The good news is that Orange is a real talent, a writer unafraid to take risks with form or subject, who looks baldly at topics many Americans are blind to, who can write points of view in an ironically academic realm or an ironically street-level one. As short as the work is, as many characters as he paraded before us, I still want to learn more of them. And more good news: he's still writing.